From January 8th to February 12th. Opening on Saturday, January
8th at 4 pm
Formula
Film Making:
Nathalie Melikian’s Film Installations
By Olivier Asselin, guest author
Contemporary art definitely has a great interest in the
cinema. The so-called “visual” arts have undoubtedly
always been interested in film, from the birth of the
seventh art and regularly since that date, with the historic
avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, for example,
or Minimalism and Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 70s.
Over the past fifteen years, however, the cinema has once
again become a privileged subject in the visual arts,
as seen in the work of a number of artists--Jeff Wall,
Stan Douglas, Geneviève Cadieux, Douglas Gordon,
Mark Lewis, Matthew Barney, etc.--and several exhibitions
on the subject--from The Projected Image to Future
Cinema and Hitchcock--to name only the most
obvious examples. Within the visual arts, what artists
have found interesting about the cinema has not always
been the same: some have been attracted to the technological
aspects of filming, others to issues of spectatorship
and projection, and others still to the narrative forms
of fiction film.
Nathalie Melikian’s work is a part of this heightened
interest in the cinema. It is both contemporary art and
cinema: films and installations, film installations and
film as installation. Here, the cinema is inseparable
from the way it is shown--projected on a large screen--and
viewed--as a collective experience, at least potentially.
Thus Action (1999), for example, is a film loop
projected onto a giant screen in the gallery space. As
its title indicates, it is an action film, an ordinary
action film--with a hero, a heroine, bad guys, a central
conflict, love, chase scenes, gun shots, killings, etc.--and
an abundant soundtrack.
But what’s singular about this film is that it has
no dialogue and, above all, no images: on screen, title
cards simply file past: words, sentences, paragraphs,
black on a white background, separated by dissolves, generally
at the same rhythm--like a silent film that overuses intertitles
or a credit sequence that is too long (the procedure also
recalls Michael Snow’s film So Is This).
These sentences describe the film we don’t see:
its story, location, protagonists, action, camera movements,
editing, sound, music, etc.
These sentences describe all this, however, in an elliptical
and above all very general manner. They are often incomplete
and vague, even a single word: “Action”, “Scene”,
“Hero, Tall and Handsome”, “Bad Ass
Villain”, “Big Breasted Blonde Woman”,
“Airport”, “Exterior City. Day”,
“Bomb Ticking”, “Blood Bath”,
“Endless Failed Escape Attempts”, “Dialogue”,
“Close Up”, “Angle Shot”, “Circular
Pan”, “Travelling Shot”, “Crane
Down From High Angle”, “Frame”, “Cut
To”, “Dissolve”, “Build Up”,
“Actual Sound”, “Voice Over”,
“Bridge Music”, etc.
By replacing the film with its description, its images
with text, there is little to see in these works. But
they leave a lot to the imagination. These words and sounds,
this melodramatic music, obviously produce a lot of mental
images. A method such as this thus also reveals the role
of the imagination in the cinematic experience as a whole,
which always fills in the gaps left by the image--the
before, after, near, far, off-screen, gloomy, soft-focus,
etc. It also reveals the importance of sound and music
in the cinema, and in dominant cinema in particular, where
they have probably become the most effective ways of ensuring
the audience’s immersion in the story, of creating
an emotional response, and of facilitating our understanding
and interpretation of the film.
Here, however, the method is essentially parodic in nature.
The film is a kind of remake, an ironic and not apologetic
remake. The language used to describe this absent film
calls to mind the often primary and always condensed style
of the scripts of the most commercial films which, in
order to minimise the time needed to read and interpret
the film, go straight to the heart of the matter. Shown
like this in an art gallery setting, this language lends
itself to being viewed humorously.
In this work, the description is often so general that
it seems to address less a specific film than a film genre;
let’s say, not to waste time, the commercial action
film. And in this way, the text often surreptitiously
passes to the critical meta-language of cinema studies,
which analyses the prevailing forms of the genre: “Formula
Film Making”, “Good Guys/Bad Guys”,
“FX Scenes, Everyone Dies Except The Hero and His
Girl”, “Melodrama”, “No One Will
Shoot At The Hero While He Is Crying In Agony Over The
Loss Of His Friend. The Battle Will Resume As Soon As
He Is Over His Grief And Gets Angry. The Hero Will Be
Victorious Within 45 Seconds Of Becoming Angry”.
Sound effects, photos, and conventional music reinforce
this analytical dimension.
Melikian’s work thus shares some features with scholarly
criticism of dominant cinema, which is essentially American.
It contributes in its own way to the study of that cinema’s
narrative conventions and political ideology, particularly
the ideology of militarism, and of its stereotypes and
images of masculinity and femininity, which are constantly
being renewed.
Contemporary art’s interest in the cinema is thus
often a critical interest. It works to reveal, analyse,
deconstruct and even to denounce the forms and content
of a kind of dominant cinema, sometimes for aesthetic
or historical reasons but especially for moral and political
reasons. This critical interest is a sign, no doubt, of
the importance of film studies within visual studies,
within the range of disciplines studying the image, particularly
in art history and studio art. But it is a sign, above
all, of the cinema’s popularity and influence today.
But why is contemporary art today interested more in cinema
than in television, or the Internet for example, which
are phenomena just as if not more popular, influential,
and problematic than the cinema?
It may be that, underneath this critical interest in a
dominant social form, lies an emotional fascination for
an art form which leaves no one indifferent. From this
perspective, what contemporary art reveals above all is
the central role cinema still plays in our collective
imagination, in both so-called “high” and
“low” culture.
But why does the cinema fascinate us so much, the way
no other art and no other image does? Why does it still
fascinate us so much today?
It is normal for a form of artistic expression to be interested
in a new technology, for an art form to be interested
in an emerging industry, if only to size up the competition
threatening to replace it or limit its influence. And
this is why, no doubt, visual art first became interested
in the cinema. In the early twentieth century, the cinema
quickly became a serious rival to all the image arts,
and for all the other arts as well. Some artistic practices
may have initially rejected the cinema, but many ended
up trying to assimilate it by using its technology or
imitating its content, forms, apparatus or effects.
Today, however, other forms of spectacle and other images
have appeared--more efficient, more entertaining, and
more profitable too. And yet the visual arts, like many
other arts moreover, keep coming back to the cinema. But
they come back in a different manner: no longer to drive
out a fear of the future, but perhaps on the contrary
through a kind of nostalgia. It is as if the cinematic
image, more than any other image today, was able to reveal
a truth that the din of electronic images renders inaudible.
It is as if that image, which Benjamin said was going
to help destroy the aura of the work of art, has become,
through a singular reversal of history, the aura’s
last refuge: the site of a real presence, of a sacred
quality, if not of meaning.
Nathalie Melikian’s installations may very well
formulate a critique of a kind of cinema by condemning
its images in an iconoclastic gesture; still, they succumb
to the fascination of the most archaic qualities of the
cinematic apparatus. These projections of light and sound
in this darkened room invite us to immerse ourselves in
them the way the magic lantern did before them--to our
great delight.
